Volume 18, Number 7
Nov 1994

Friends of Dard Hunter Meet in Chillicothe, Dard's Home Town

by Marcia Watt, Emory University

The 1994 annual meeting of the Friends of Dard Hunter took place
in Chillicothe, Ohio, October 20-23, 1994. There were a variety of
presentations on wide ranging subjects related to papermaking,
including: correct posture when working at the vat (Peter Thomas);
separate reports on teaching papermaking in Alabama (Sally Wood
Johnson), England (Gillian Spires), Australia (Jean Kropper),
Argentina (Vicki and Pablo Sigwald), Tibet (Tom Leech) and the
Yucatan (Mark Callahan); videos "Paper and Gold" on papermaking in
Burma (Rona Richter, video by Aaron Berman) and "The Last
Papermakers on the Silk Road" (Sidney and Elaine Koretsky); the
importance of gelatin size in the longevity of paper (Timothy
Barrett); and a vacuum couching process (Chuck Stahl).

A trade fair provided attendees the opportunity to purchase
handmade paper from several different mills, a variety of decorated
papers, books (both letterpress and commercially published), and
papermaking supplies.

Highlights of the meeting included tours of the Mead Paper Mill
and an afternoon at Mountain House, Dard Hunter's home. After a
brief introduction in a classroom, everyone touring the Mead Mill
was issued a hardhat, safety goggles and ear plugs. The tour
followed the papermaking process from the removal of logs from
trucks to the seven acre warehouse where packaged paper is stored
prior to shipment for sale. The huge Valmet papermaking machine was
an awesome machine to behold. The visit to Mountain House offered
an extreme contrast to the paper mill tour, as attendees had
opportunities to make paper using Dard Hunter's mould with the
Hunter family crest (Kathryn and Howard Clark of Twinrocker); to
make paper in the traditional Japanese manner, including the
preliminary steps of scraping the dark fibers from kozo and beating
the cooked fibers (Lynn Amlie, Kate Martinson and Scott Snyder); and
to design and make paste paper (Bonnie Stahlecker). There were also
demonstrations on making type (Stan Nelson), marbling paper (Tom
Leech), making moulds (Timothy Moore) and making paper from flax
(Helmut Becker). Throughout the afternoon a string quartet played
music on the terrace overlooking Chillicothe.

The Friends of Dard Hunter was founded in 1981 to encourage
preservation of the artifacts in the Dard Hunter Paper Museum in
Appleton, Wisconsin. The Institute of Paper Science and Technology,
which owns the Museum, has since moved it to modern quarters in
Atlanta and given it a professional curator, so the group has
reoriented itself around Hunter's central interests, which were the
crafts involved in making paper and books.

Next year's annual meeting will take place in Austin, Texas.
Tentative dates are October 12-15, 1995. For membership or other
information regarding the Friends of Dard Hunter, please contact:
Ms. Pat Ullom, N8279 Island View Rd., Fish Creek, Wisconsin
54212-9734.